Scars
the shell’s song deafens
roaring with loss. A story
of lives that should be
On my right cheek there is a fine white thread of scar tissue. Nestled among tiny veins and freckles, the scar evokes images of my father standing at the sink, face lathered in silky foam. Only three or four years old at the time, my unbroken gaze fixed on every movement of the ritual, watching foam disappear with the passing of the razor, sweep after perfect sweep. Against such whiteness, my father’s face and hands shone a deep, reassuring brown. They were capable hands—hands that once saved me from a coral snake, pointed out the deep blue wings of the Mort Bleu moth, held me on the day I was born.
I remember the cold weight of the stainless steel razor and the delight of applying foam to my face. Like my father had done, I positioned the razor just so and pulled downward from my cheekbone. Predictably, blood leaped to the blade at first contact, trickling over the surface of the foam. I dropped the razor in the sink, jumped down from the stool and ran to the kitchen for help.
Doubtless I was scolded, but I don’t remember it. I remember only colours: white, brown, red. I remember fascination: the slicing away of the white foam. I remember surprise: what had I done wrong?
Stories spring brightly from scars just as blood sprang from the wound on my cheek. Mostly, I think of scars as individual wounds, not wounds of the collective. But on the islands of Haida Gwaii, I found scars that conjured images so vivid I felt as if the stories were my own. I learned that not all scars are private; that some scars belong to us all.
When I boarded the floatplane to the southern tip of Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, I thought I was prepared. Along with my sketchbooks, my bird book and my secret stash of chocolate, was a book of maps and names. The maps showed the individual houses of each old village site and the names of the families who had once lived in them. I hoped to bring history alive as I discovered this fabled coastline with every stroke of my paddle. I couldn’t have predicted what a terrible thing that could be.
The islands lie 160 kilometres off the coast of northwestern British Columbia and are known for their misty beauty, Indigenous history and pockets of refugia—little miracles of land and life untouched by the last glaciation. The southern portion is mostly uninhabited, accessible only by boat or floatplane. Even then, travel is dependent on good weather and gentle seas, neither of which is likely. The isolation was attractive to me. I was there to help Gord, a kayak guide friend, with a week-long trip to SGang Gwaay Llnagaay, best known for the nineteenth-century village of Nan Sdins. The island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the southwestern part of the archipelago.
Picture yourself on a small rock, flayed by monstrous seas. Life on Nan Sdins must have been like that at times. The village is a few miles west of the main body of the archipelago, perched on an island at the very edge of the continental shelf. Here, the ocean depth slides from sixty metres to three thousand. The swell height fluctuates without warning and the average water temperature can render a person unconscious within an hour. But an abundance of seafood allowed people to thrive here and create a rich, artistic culture. My guidebook showed the locations of the renowned mortuary totem poles and longhouse remains and the names of the families who lived and died here. There was no certainty that we’d reach our destination, given the volatility for which that coastline is known, but I looked forward to seeing the historical artifacts.
The Haida Gwaii archipelago felt more remote and spacious than other places I had paddled. The inlets, with their flapping sandhill cranes, seemed to echo and vanish into the soft distance. No motorboats hurried from point to point; no other groups of kayakers dotted the horizon. In the open, moss-muffled forest along our way to Nan Sdins, occasional green rectangular outlines showed where longhouses had once stood. There is little undergrowth on the islands, due to the voracious appetites of an over-abundant deer population and an absence of wolves or cougars. In a way, it was liberating to walk among the trees of the forest without elbowing through thickets of salal or beating aside thorny salmonberry fronds. And it was curious to see history written like a language in shapes upon the forest floor.
Sitting beside one of the mossed-over rectangles, I looked up family names: Raven Moiety, Eagle Moiety, Striped Town People, Sand Town People… I tried to picture the beach alive with children playing. But there were no people in this part of Haida Gwaii. This extensive land mass was deserted. Smallpox came and life ended. The realization hit me with force. Like scar tissue, moss sealed up the wounds of history—an entire population suddenly dead. It was that simple, that brutal. The 1862 smallpox epidemic began in what was then Fort Victoria and rapidly spread up the coast, littering the Inside Passage with bodies. Seagoing Northwest Coast canoes were seen fleeing homeward, hoping—too late—to escape the disease, their occupants already stricken and putrefying. In some places the mortality rate was as high as 90 percent. In SGang Gwaay Llnagaay, the few who survived were moved to villages in the north of the archipelago. And now there was no one. The land was not spacious; it was empty. The people had been poured away and the lonely echo was that of their lost voices.
As I sat and thought about the decimation of families, the swiftness of the illness, the brutal pustules and weeping skin, a larger impression grew around me. Smallpox was over, but the wounds of contact still wept—visible, if you chose to see them. The epidemic might have changed, but people were still dying. Fresh in my mind was a young man’s death several years before.
I was nineteen and had lived in Canada for barely two years. My partner’s family mostly lived in the village of Opitsaht, just across the water from Tofino. It was evening when a man came running into the family home. A birthday party was in full swing and we’d just cut the cake.
“Come quick,” he said. “My son has hung himself.”
The words jolted across the room. Then he disappeared out of the door, leaving it open.
My son has hung himself.
I could almost see those words, but it still took a few seconds to grasp what they might mean. Time slowed as I imagined a tree branch, a body swinging, hands grasping at a rope in a last-minute change of mind. There’s still time to save him, I thought. And then it dawned on me: I might be the only person who could perform artificial respiration. If so, I needed to act quickly. I breathed hard and stood up. Then my legs gave out and I sat down again. I was once told that the average layperson trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation might feel unable to take action. Suddenly, I could see why. The fear was paralyzing. What if I made a mistake? But what if someone died when I could have helped them? I stood up, shaking. I put one foot in front of the other. At the door, a tall man barred my way.
“Ladies should stay here,” he said, jerking his chin toward the now-silent living room. I looked over my shoulder and saw only women and children. All the men had vanished, except this one.
“I can help him,” I said. “I know CPR.” He looked in my eyes, then lifted his arm.
Outside in the mid-winter darkness, I stumbled over the grass to the next house, muttering my ABCs. Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Airway, Breathing, Circulation. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but I suspected that I wouldn’t be going as far as the fourth essential: D for Deadly Bleeding. I flipped through the order of actions, the ratios of breaths to compressions. I pressed my index and middle fingers together in preparation for feeling a pulse. Please let him have a pulse! My breath rose in small, fearful clouds as I jogged. Eventually, I pushed my way through a small group of men, up the wooden stairs and into a hallway.
“Where?” I asked, with what I hoped was confidence.
A teenage boy pointed down the hall where a door stood ajar, light spilling out of it. I paused outside the door and breathed again. My hand was visibly shaking and I was still breathing hard. I tried to erase the image of the tree and prepare for a new image. Then I squeezed my eyes tight and emptied my mind of everything except CPR.
“I can do first aid,” I said, entering the room, relieved to see my partner and his brother standing there. I glanced around at the ceiling, looking for a rope, or any other signs of hanging. My partner caught my eye and shook his head. “I don’t think anyone can help him now, Joanna.” He gestured downward to the man lying curled on the brown bedroom carpet, close to the built-in closet he had been pulled out of. The cord had bitten deeply into his neck, making a groove I could fit my little finger into. I knelt to find a carotid pulse, but cold resistance travelled from my fingertips to my brain, to my stomach. Would I feel a pulse through this? I looked at his mouth and wondered if his last words were still caught there, and if so what they were. What if my breath blew the words away? Would they flutter upward, released? Would we see them, or hear them? But this once-vital person was lying outside the realm of words. In the final reckoning, action was the only language that could express his despair.
“He’s been dead for five hours,” my brother-in-law said. “You won’t find anything.”
I made a mental readjustment as I looked up at the brothers, standing there above me, arms hanging down, faces grim. Not five minutes, as I’d previously thought. Five hours! I thought of how much brain damage can occur in such a time frame; the inevitability of death. I felt for a pulse anyway, counting the seconds but knowing that I was much too late to be of help. After a few minutes I pulled my fingers away and tucked them under my shins. I noted the small depressions my fingers had left behind and hoped my marks would fade. I looked once again at this face with its message of anguish. I’d only known my partner for a summer, yet this was the third suicide in his community, the third young man to hang himself. I’d read newspaper articles about the suicide rates in Indigenous communities across North America. I looked at the small closet they had taken him from. There wasn’t room to stand up in it. He must have been kneeling.
A life ending in the ultimate act of despair, and a forest, green and thriving, seemingly at peace. It was jarring to connect these two moments. Generations had passed, yet the memory of a culture still lived within the forest. I pictured hands at work—the picking of berries, stripping of cedar bark, drying of fish. I contrasted the horror of smallpox: families stricken and dying, the fear, the grief, the living tending the dying before they in turn succumbed. Until this moment, the fact of smallpox had been assigned to the rational portion of my brain. But now it migrated, reseating itself among felt experiences, joining with memories of a distraught father dashing into a house, crying for help; the memory of a young man’s life, lost on a winter’s night.
I looked through the forest to the shoreline, where the guests were relaxing, chatting, waiting for supper. I took a deep breath and bid adieu to the green scars. But as I walked back to camp, I knew I hadn’t left them behind. They joined with me, taking up residence like an extra rib.
As the journey continued, we moved toward the outer edge of Gwaii Haanas, leaving the long, calm inlets for the exposed coastal shores. Every day’s journey was evaluated and re-evaluated moment by moment as the sea state changed. Everywhere there was wildlife—tiny tame deer, equally small bears, vibrant shoals of silver fish swirling beneath us like disco balls, while seabirds, eagles, seals and dogfish devoured them, mouthful by mouthful. We planned to cross from Louscoone Point to SGang Gwaay Llnagaay. We would visit Nan Sdins, then continue on to Kunghit Island. At every stopping point there seemed to be some sort of hint at the life before contact. I didn’t mention my thoughts to the guests, but I wondered how it would feel to walk through the village site at Nan Sdins. Already, I’d seen photographs of it and knew how beautiful it was. And the greater the beauty, it seemed to me, the greater the loss.
We finally reached the island after an exhilarating passage through swells that had risen by the hour that afternoon. As we crossed from Louscoone Point, the water rose up against the stern quarter of the kayaks, shooting them forward in wild surges of acceleration. Some of the guests floundered, needing reassurance. We landed in a quiet, west-facing bay, where a dark, densely treed path led to the village. Even as we approached, goosebumps rose on my arms. And as we came into the bright clearing, the sight of the tip-tilted grey totem poles brought me to tears. I lingered at the back of the group, steeling myself for what was to come.
The village holds the ruins of ten houses and thirty-two memorial or mortuary poles. It is protected by a modern-day Haida watchman, who lives on the island during the summer. Traditionally, watchmen were seen in threes on the top of totem poles, wearing tall hats. They watched for the approach of news, good or bad. Wanagan was our watchman that day. He took his role seriously, greeting us, assessing our intentions and showing us how to behave on the island. After that, we were left to roam at will.
The guests separated, wandering alone through the remains. Each carving was unique, magnificent, achingly beautiful. Some poles had fallen, lying on the ground like tombstones in a forgotten cemetery. But cemeteries are intended for the dead; villages are built for the living. The poles were not meant to be epitaphs, but living accounts of events. The carving was perfect and precise, despite a lack of sophisticated tools. I read the stories of each house and each family. I half-managed to picture the village alive and thriving. I tried not to dwell on the brutality of disease, despite the air of sudden abandonment and all it implied. It was the decay that was so poignant. According to custom, these chapters of history close with the rotting of the poles. The poles weren’t going to be replaced by fresh poles and fresh stories. They were dying, just as the people died. Just as the people continue to die. And once those old poles are gone, what then? What will that signify?
In terrible irony, through the vanishing remains of Haida villages, history became inescapably alive for me. It leaped from the past into the present, the collective scars of a people etching out the wound, as palpable as the mark on my cheek. These signs of truth, how long will the pain of them endure?